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Friday, May 21, 2010

Mook

I suppose it's another one of those late nights...

While in Korea, we enjoyed mook everywhere we went. Eating mook at various restaurants in various forms totally made me reminisce my childhood.

My parents were always hard workers, so my lil bro and I were often left in the care of a "halmoni". One of the halmonis I remember the most was the one who would pick up acorns on the street. She, my brother and I would make a game of collecting the tiny acorns on the sidewalk leading up to my lil bro's preschool. Halmoni would bring a plastic bag with her on the walk and would encourage us to collect as many as we could.

She would then bring home those acorns, painstakingly take them out of their tough exterior and then grind them down into a fine powder. Somehow she would take that fine powder and make mook out of it.

I used to call it Korean jello.

I don't know how she did it, for I never bothered paying much attention at the age of ten...but it's one thing I'm dying to figure out in the next few weeks.

I shall keep you updated! This WILL be my next conquest in the kitchen. =P And NO, I will not be grinding my own acorns. I hear they sell powdered acorn...

8 comments:

Good ol' mook... It's still hard to pick it up with chopsticks but I remember getting so frustrated as a kid as it kept just halving into smaller and smaller pieces as I tried to grab a piece off the plate with my chopsticks.

Yep, they do sell acorn starch/acorn flour. :) Maangchi has a recipe for it, I believe. Also.. There's a cookbook called "A Korean Mother's Cooking Notes," that has a recipe for mook. I never tried it, but have been meaning to. I can send the recipe if you like?

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